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John Long

Recent columns

• Assault on religious liberty
• Some people need firing
• You missed the boat; too bad
• Christmas during war

From the RoundTable blog

So some drunk-driving fool crashes into the Confederate statue outside of the Franklin County Courthouse, causing various parts of Johnny Reb to secede from his body. Unbeknownst to the driver (or the statue), the collision soon provoked another chapter in the debate over how -- or whether -- the Civil War should be remembered.

The statue -- often mistaken to be the county's favorite son Jubal Early -- had stood guard over the courthouse since 1910. He was typical of such memorials in public squares throughout the South, usually placed as the Civil War generation was dying out. The damage seems irreparable; but the debate that ensued was not over possible repairs, but whether such a memorial is even appropriate for the modern age.

The Civil War means something entirely different today than it did in 1910. Much modern thought holds that the war was about slavery alone, and as such any effort to remember the Confederacy must pass through a politically correct filter of denunciation. Any attempt to pay tribute to the long-dead boys in gray must be viewed as a de facto defense of slavery and racism. Inevitably, some Rocky Mounters opined that even if the statue could be repaired, it shouldn't be.

Ironically, an opposite view was once in vogue. Any suggestion that the Confederate cause was anything but pristine caused huffy tantrums. One winter day in 1911, a Roanoke County judge, W.W. Moffett, idly leafing through his daughter's history textbook from Roanoke College, found the text insulting to the memory of the Confederacy. Though there was nothing factually inaccurate in the book, Moffett, a trustee of the school, immediately went to the college president, then the professor, then the press, demanding the text be withdrawn from all classrooms.

The ensuing furor brought the little college into national headlines and inspired a spirited debate over academic freedom versus acceptable memory of the Lost Cause.

Moffett's view -- that no negative portrayal of the South should be publicly voiced -- is still around in a few "unreconstructed" Civil War buffs. More common are those who will tolerate no good thing said about Dixie at all. In my view, neither side does justice to the cause of history.

Why is this war still being debated so vehemently? Part of the fault lies with Southerners a generation back. They allowed the imagery of the Confederacy, especially the Confederate Navy Jack, to be used by the anti-segregation forces of the 1950s and '60s. As a result, in the eyes of many the Confederacy came to be associated exclusively with racial slavery.

Was the Civil War caused by slavery? Of course it was. It's fatuous to suggest otherwise. Look at the pre-war crisis: Slavery was the inescapable issue. Wilmot Proviso, Dred Scott, Kansas-Nebraska Act -- the unresolved question of slavery dominated politics long before Fort Sumter.

But was the war only about slavery? Again, it oversimplifies to say so. Some inescapable facts: Only a minority of Southerners owned slaves, but a majority was ready to fight; the majority of Unionists, Lincoln included, expressed no urgent desire to free the slaves until after the war had started. In fact, slavery continued in some Union states for part of the war.

The South seceded, in my interpretation, over the issue of states' rights, of which slavery was the overriding but not sole ingredient. The Southern secessionists no longer considered themselves part of the United States, which they viewed as a voluntary and dissolvable union. The lives of 620,000 were sacrificed to sort it all out, and along the way the scourge of slavery was thankfully ended.

So how can we remember the Confederacy?

How about truthfully, warts and all? The Civil War happened, and it defined American history once it did. Men (and a few women) fought valiantly on both sides for causes in which they believed -- preserving the Union, or the "rights of the South." On race relations, it's natural that the slave-holding South offends us, but neither side lived up to our modern sense of egalitarianism. With a little understanding, I think we can honor the soldiers without letting modern politics trample their memory.

Oh, and as Johnny Reb would tell you, don't drink and drive.

Long, director of the Salem Museum and a history teacher at Roanoke College, is a Roanoke Times columnist.